


Outside

by SimplySyra



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 00:57:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8600821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplySyra/pseuds/SimplySyra
Summary: "The blood ran out and I became a god."





	

Every now and then there are children. 

Tiny crumpled sacks thrown to the gutter with scrapes on their knees and blood on their lips. Blue-black bruises hung like burnished medals across small round cheeks and burst capillaries spattered like tiny jewels across their pale broken necks. 

The only finery they will ever wear.

Sometimes they live. Most of the time they don’t.

And once in a very great while, when he sees that fate has scrawled itself through the stars of their brief and flickering lives, he reaches out and gathers them to him. Takes them into the cold of his embrace and carries them to the cradle of his unmaking. There he births them again, vengeance burning his Mark into their hearts and hands.

And they dance. Like dark waves across the face of the ink-stained sea. Like the shadows of monstrous creatures moving sad and silent across the vast ocean floors.

They dance and they die and he turns his gaze to another.

They remind him of….not himself. But of a scattered, half forgotten melody. A series of broken notes that repeat and remember and whisper themselves back to a place half forgotten.

Sacrificial flesh pressed against stone, blood pooling at the back of his throat along with a hundred unspoken pleas and prayers. 

He can’t remember his name. His own mother’s face.

But he can remember the taste of blood filling his gasping mouth: Salt and metal. He can remember his cry cut short, bubbling and gurgling as he drowned in the thick warm ocean of his own lifeforce. Like grains of sand through an hourglass, he watched the waves come in and the stars go out. 

He was a child. Once. 

And now.

Now he is nothing. A nothing so far reaching and empty that it knew Itself. And in knowing Itself, sought him out. Broke him against a stone altar and drank the blood from his veins.

He turns his gaze once again to the rats scurrying patiently through the gutter and waits for the stars to go out.


End file.
